


A Sweet Treasure for the Birds to Look at

by 7_11



Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blind Character, Gen, Magical Realism, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25352872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/7_11/pseuds/7_11
Summary: On the Lord’s Day, Jack Murdock knocked on his son’s door.(Matt’s dad comes back to life. He doesn’t know how to handle it.)
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson & Karen Page
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the play Antigone.

On the Lord’s Day, Jack Murdock knocked on his son’s door. 

Matt heard him come up, heard the slow beating of his heart, the thudding of his footfalls, the sound of too little oxygen filling his lungs. His father smells like dirt, he thinks; the forest maybe. Like pine needles and mud and rotting animal meat. How his father is alive precedes him. Matt decides not to open the door. 

Jack is still there on Monday morning. Matt sits on the other side of the door with his morning coffee. The knocking starts again. 

They sit together for an hour, father and son reunited at last; while a wedge of wood stands between them. Matt brushes the dirt off of his slacks and rises. He’s going to take the roof access today.

He slides down the rails of the fire escape and folds out his cane before hitting the streets. His feet pad against the concrete and all he can think of is the sound of knuckles on wood. The shadows feel colder today, dripping with heavy moisture. A bird pecks at a dead rat on the footpath.

  
  
  
  
  


“Something is wrong,” He tells Foggy and Karen, “it’s like the whole world is on stilts”. Karen brushes her hair behind her ear and offers him a cup of coffee. 

“Matt’s finally clued into the fact that his life is a mess.” Foggy whispers at her. 

“I mean that my dad has been outside my apartment since last night knocking on the door.” He says, gracelessly.

“Oh shit… Wait, what the fuck.”

  
  
  
  
  


They converge again 2 minutes later in the meeting room after a collective freak out. 

“So you didn’t actually  _ see  _ him? Maybe it was some rando.” Foggy says. 

“I saw him as much as I  _ see  _ anyone,” Matt replies “which is to say I recognised the beat of his heart and the sound of his breath. He smelt like a forest, instead of sweat and whiskey. Earthy and deep. Though my only reference for a body of woods is Central Park.” 

Matt hears Karen’s hasty scribbling on her notepad. 

“Not gonna lie, Matty, but it’s probably just some weird junkie asshole wanting a free Airbnb in a fancy New York City loft.” Foggy is always one for rationality.

“Look, can you guys just come and check it out with me during our lunch break. Something’s wrong about this.” 

“Ooo can we get Chinese before we leave?” Thanks for your contribution, Karen.

“Bring your gun too.” 

“We are not shooting my dead dad, Foggy.”

  
  
  
  
  


They wade through 3 hours worth of paperwork, all in their separate rooms (there’s been a distinct lack of new clientele this past week, Matt thinks quietly. It’s probably nothing, Foggy says.). Matt feels the light through his office’s blinds shift over his face as the sun reaches noon in the sky. His fingers are numb from running them over his files and he digs his thumbnails into his finger-pads until they make small indents across his prints. 

“Hey man, you ready? Karen just got lunch.” Foggy says from the door of his office.

“I used the company account,” Karen shouts from her desk.

Matt nods. He never truly grew out of his need for visual cues, both the need to present them himself and to interpret them from others. Although those around him have changed their behaviour to suit him, there’s a special nuance conveyed through nonverbal gestures. ‘You can’t be privy to everything’, his trauma recovery counsellor once said. Maybe she had a point, or maybe she was laying it on sugary sweet, like a heaping serving of honey, dripping off the spoon. 

They sit around Karen’s desk for lunch. Matt fingers a pair of chopsticks as he waits for his friends to unwrap the rest of the meal. 

“So,” Karen draws out, “You’ve been pretty quiet this morning. I didn’t even hear you complain about the spotty WIFI at all.” He thinks she’s talking to him.

Foggy makes a displeased noise through the mouthful of his spring roll. 

Matt swallows his bite of chop suey, “Ah. It’s not every day your dead father comes back to life. Lots to think about…” He leaves a pause for rumination. 

”Although, I have to ask, what were you writing down in the conference room earlier?”

Karen laughs and digs out the crumpled loose leaf from her desk. She shoves it at Foggy, who drags his fingers up and down his pant legs before taking it. The oil clings to the synthetic fabric of his dress pants. He barks out a small laugh. 

“Karen drew a shitty picture of Jessica kicking you in the balls,” Foggy relays. Great. Matt lets out a smile. 

  
  
  
  
  


The walk back to his apartment takes them 3 minutes longer than he’s used to, but it feels 8 minutes shorter. Matt tries to land every step with his foot flat against the sidewalk as Karen chats with Foggy over his head. He feels the vibrations of the subway run up his legs and settle at his thighs. The tapping of his cane hits harsher than before, brushing through the current of pedestrians. He feels trepidatious, nervous in the way one feels when one doesn’t truly know what the outcome will be. It feels like a jumble of phlegm settled deep in his throat that he can’t cough out. 

“The fire escape?” Karen asks. Matt nods. Their plan (they drafted it on the way over) is lackadaisical on Foggy’s part. He still answers every one of Matt’s sentences, just with a degree of cynical scepticism. Matt dismantles his cane and shoves it deep in his waistband, before jumping up to the ladder of the fire escape. The corrosion covering the rails bothers him more than it did in the morning. 

Matt climbs up the rest of the stairs to the rooftop. A pigeon sits on the stone wall and coos at him. He can hear the knocking.

  
  
  
  
  


They all sit down on the other side of the door together. The knocking persists. Shaky inhale, knock, inhale, knock, inhale, nothing. 

“Matty?” 

His dad’s voice is throaty. His breath smells like thick mud and ground bones. 

God help me.


	2. Chapter 2

Foggy Nelson has only seen Jack Murdock’s face twice in his life. 

Both times were strictly glances of the ratty memorial bookmark that Matty kept tucked in his bible. 

Matt’s dad behind the door looks like the photo, but not. He looked like the ink of his features had bled down the page. Half of his face is drooping downwards in a languishing frown. He’s wearing a navy linen suit; the top button hangs low on its threads. His shoes are carved and nicked, resembling the tears of a thin bed sheet dragged through a patch of thistles.

“Dad?” 

Something is wrong. Foggy’s instincts are spinning in circles and he knows Matt can hear the rise of his heartbeat. Matt is tensing and loosening his hands in rapid succession. 

Something is profoundly, profoundly wrong.

“What are you?” Foggy hears Matt ask. 

“Matty.” His dad says. There is finality in his statement. 

The man is still where he should be twitching. His fingers hang still at his sides like the sagging roots of a maple tree, mouth a thin twig of bramble. 

Karen is the first to move. She dances around the father and son and presses them through the door frame and past the wide entryway. The door clicks closed in the hesitant quiet. Noon sun filters through Matt’s milky windows and highlights the sprinkle of blood across his dad’s cotton dress shirt. 

There’s a ringing in Foggy’s head as he watches Matt angle his chin down onto his chest. 

“So you weren’t lying?” Karen this is _not_ the right time.

“Let’s just…” Foggy drifts. His hand, a song bird, perches on Karen’s shoulder.

Matt’s hands are on his face. Foggy watches as he drags his fingernails into his skin and under his eyes. He moves to catch Matt’s hands in his.

“Stop that,” he says, “you are going to sit down and we are going to work this out.”

“You and Karen can leave, it's fine.” 

“No, no no. Buddy, I’m with you for life, even though apparently even that’s not definite anymore.”

Matt’s face sours. _Foggy this is not the right time._

And Matt drops his hands.

  
  
  
  
  


Matt’s dad sits on the leather armchair across from them. His small puffs of air are magnified by his lack of movement. Foggy has his hand on Matt’s knee, the ironed fabric is smooth over his skin and pills under Foggy’s pale, clammy hands. Karen has her notebook open again.

“Do you think he says anything else that’s not your name?” Karen asks. 

The three of them look pointedly at the man in the chair. 

“Matty.” Matt’s dad says.

  
  
  
  
  


Their lunchbreak passes quickly after that, the majority of it taken up by Karen and Foggy’s unabating interrogation. Matt sits between the two for the whole twenty minutes they have left. He’s an ivory statuette, unmoving lips and delicate white skin. The questioning is in vain, though not for a certain lack of trying. The man (who is seeming less and less like Matt’s dad) answers every sentence with a strong ‘Matty’. Foggy feels a build-up at the back of his throat as both he and Karen slowly taper off. The journal is left blank in Karen’s lap. 

“Think we can zip tie him to the bed and come back to this?” Foggy says, standing and stretching his arms above his head, “We still have two files to get through at work.”

Matt lets out a small sigh and nods his head. Foggy pulls his friends up and they get back to business. 

  
  
  
  
  


Foggy sits in his office and thinks about the man with his hands tied to a gas pipe in the corner of Matt’s apartment. His fingers lay lax on his keyboard. He has research to do. 

  
  
  
  
  


Turns out, Karen had the same idea (Matt had just spent the last hour with his head in his hands.). The three of them meet at Karen’s desk and watch as she pushes half of her documents off the side and onto the floor. 

That afternoon, they create a master word document listing any possible solution for their ‘predicament’ that stands at 16 pages long. They detail everything they experienced, the palpable feeling of uncomfort, the dread that built up inside of each of them, the chronic _wrongness_. The more they talk about the experience, the more gross they feel. Deep inside of their souls it festers and smoulders, the flame of a match doubling in its size. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell I like using similes


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY after rereading the past two chapters over and over I really despise them. A lot. But I have a lot of shit on my plate right now so rewriting them is most likely never going to happen. So let it be said I hate them just as much as someone else might do.

Waxy plant stems brush lightly in the wind, broken through the concrete, life through even the darkest crevices. The breeze moves around them, a miniscule skim of air, a minute sough in Matt’s ears; something small to focus on. But the smell is something different, something of mire and leaf litter. A daisy head floats in the atmosphere. Matt crouches down to pluck it from it’s cradle, patting his hand down and across the pavement to find the roots. There’s no one up or down the street there to watch; a rarity in Manhattan. 

  


Running his fingers over it, feeling the whorl of his fingerprints interact with the gummy end, endlessly tracing the pattern of the single leaf, trailing along the crest of the flower’s head-

  


He takes it back to his apartment. 

  
  
  
  
  


It feels like he should be over this already. 

  


He built his dad wax wings and when his dad flew high, face illuminated by the singular lightbulb of the boxing gym, Matt cried when he fell. 

  


He spent 6 years stewing on the bottom of a bunk bed in the corner of St. Agnes and 3 in a dorm with a revolving door of roommates before he finally met Foggy and was pulled from his swelling restlessness. Away from the tantalising need to fantasize about the endless what-ifs and away from his palpable aura of guilt of a life left unlived that followed him, Laelaps nipping at his heels. 

  


The grief of his father’s death was buried down in the cold dirt as soon as he got the acceptance letter for Columbia law. 

  


Perhaps he never really processed anything. Perhaps the isolation staining his teenage years covered the dark red of dad’s blood on his hands. 

  


Grief is best experienced with others. If a tree falls in a forest and all that. His father always had a thing for idioms.

  
  
  
  
  


He drops the daisy onto the man’s lap and its scent blends seamlessly into his. The marrow of an old cow, an archaic earthy perfume. Matt hears four rats more than there used to be, scurrying under his neighbour’s floorboards.

  
  
  
  
  


“Did you take the subway here?” he asks.

  


He senses Spider-Man’s silhouette inch inwards, head lowering and left foot scuffing the ground. 

  


“Queens is far away,” the pout in the teenager’s voice is plain, “also there’s been a lot more air traffic lately.”

  


“Thought you had a schedule with the pigeon guys,” Matt replies.

  


Spider-Man hums an acknowledgement. 

  


They sit together for a while in silence, Matt sat on the slope of the water tower while Spider-Man twiddles his thumbs on the rooftop below. It feels strangely melancholic, less snarky than usual. Matt listens to a student playing Ford Dabeny songs on an untuned piano from across the street to pass time.

  


“No offence,” Spider-Man starts, “but why are you even here if you’re not going to be punching bad guys and saving kittens?”

  


“Why are  _ you  _ even here?” he replies.

  


“Answer mine first!”

  


A moment of hesitation.

  


“There’s someone in my house I don’t feel like talking to right now.”

  
  
  
  
  


He wakes up to his alarm at 6 AM. There is still a man outside the door to his bedroom, heart still slowly beating, breath still faintly whistling. Matt finds he cannot discern the fresh smell of the daisy from the man. It reminds him somewhat of the sandpit outside the classroom for the special ed kids; always slightly stinking of blood. 

  


The “Matty’s” start up again and it sparks something inside of him when the first thing he thinks of is Stick. 

  


There’s a text on his phone from Foggy:  _ Check the NY times quick _ , with a timestamp of 7 hours ago.

  


_ MIRACULOUS RECOVERY OR NEW AVENGERS ABILITY? 7 found alive in multiple hospital morgues after being confirmed deceased. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really really wanted to stretch out the lead up to the news headline and publicity but it just Wasn't Working. It feels like a short build to something major but I promise it isn't. I mean I'd barely even call this a cliffhanger.


End file.
